Today began much earlier than it should have, around 12:45 AM to be exact. I was awoken to someone coming into my room, and although I didn't understand exactly what he said, the blaring alarm and words "fire" and "get out" stuck out pretty distinctly. I headed outside, grabbing my camera and my hard drive where I save all my photos (what priorities I have!) We stood around for a few minutes, watching firemen go in and out of the hotel. There was no smell of smoke or any evidence of fire and eventually we were let back in. I believe I overheard this morning that it had something to do with a faulty alarm panel.
So I got up this morning, slightly less well rested than I had hoped to be, and headed to the bus station to try to make my way to Wroxeter where a Roman town remains in ruins. I had just missed a bus and the next one was not for an hour and forty-five minutes, so I decided to go to Shrewsbury Castle. The castle is a beautiful red color, which stood starkly against the grey, wet sky. It's quite small, looking more like a country manor house than a proper castle. This is because the original medieval origins have disappeared to make way for a newer castle. Up a hill above the castle, is Laura's Tower, a scenic tower looking out over Shrewsbury.
I decided to go into the Shropshire Regimental Museum, housed in the castle as I had so much time to kill. The collections were impressive and gave great details about British military history. I was amazed by the collections of honorary medals they had, quite possibly thousands. I also learned that the first British casualty in World War II was a native, a corporal named Thomas Priday. It was also entertaining to see some of the military history of the American Revolutionary War from the other side. I walked into one part of the museum and internally shouted, "The Red Coats are coming!" I'm a true Bay Stater, through and through.
After taking my time in the museum, I still had plenty of time on my hands and walked farther back into town. I went to St. Mary's Church, a church located towards the center of Shrewsbury. Like many churches I've visited in the U.K., they have opened a cafe in one of the side chapels of the church. I think this is such a clever idea of using space that is generally unused and a way to increase income for churches, many of which need substantial money for repairs.
The church was very beautiful on the inside, but most striking was the stained glass window behind the altar. It is a 14th century depiction of the Tree of Jesse that has supposedly been in three different churches in Shrewsbury. Though its been repaired and moved multiple times, many of the original pieces of glass are still in good condition.
I grabbed some lunch on my way back to the bus station and arrived just in time to catch my bus to Wroxeter. It had been lightly raining all day and continued to as I walked towards the visitor center at the Roman town. I decided to visit the small museum first to get a sense of the site and the history and to hopefully let the rain stop.
The site was originally home to a Roman fort called Viroconium, built around 58 CE by the Legio XIV Gemina. The legio XX Valeria Victrix soon replaced them, but the fort was not used for long. Although it was initially an important staging ground for excursions into Wales, the Roman military focus shifted to the north and Chester rose as the main military base. As the Roman military left Viroconium, they pulled down the walls and destroyed buildings to prevent any native tribes or rebels from taking the defensible position.
As the Roman army moved out, Viroconium transformed into a town. Veterans stayed behind and locals from the Cornovii tribe moved in. The town already had traders and markets established and continued to grow as civilian destination. Over time, it became the fourth largest town in Roman Britain. The town grew, building more public spaces such as bathes, a market hall, and a forum. The city, although mixed with different peoples, took on a Roman-style of administration and many of the daily practices stayed within Roman customs.
The city continued to thrive during Roman occupation, even with through changes. The rise of Christianity altered the nature of the town, as it did in many parts of the empire. There is evidence for the coexistence of a Christian church and Roman temples during the 3rd century CE, but by the 4th century the worship of pagan gods had been abandoned. Sacred objects, like the statuette below to Venus, were discarded and found by archaeologists in dump heaps.
When the Romans left Britain in 410 CE, the town was not abandoned. In the previous years, Viroconium Cornoviorum, as the town (not the fort) was known, had become more self reliant, with fewer imports from other parts of the Empire and more locally made products coming into use. The town was in a position to survive without connections across the English Channel. And it did survive for a time, but as conflict rose in sub-Roman Britain, the town began to fade. In the 6th century, a Mercian king forced all the Christians out of the remaining town. By the 7th century, the site was abandoned and many of the buildings had been torn down and repurposed.
Today, a very small fraction of Viroconium Cornoviorum has been excavated. The majority of the excavations are the massive bath complex at the site. Like in Segontium, most of the ruins just show the foundations of the buildings. A notable exception is a large piece of the bath wall, nicknamed the Old Work by locals. The piece comes from the ball of the basilica, that connected into the rest of the bath house. The basilica would have been 245 feet long by 66 feet wide. Clearly these bathes and public buildings were meant to accommodate a major settlement, unlike the 600 square foot bathhouse in Prestatyn.
The baths had a large series of hypocausts to heat what would have been a very large tepidarium and calidarium. The bath also included some unusual features for a place like Shrewsbury. The most interesting was a natatio, a large, unheated, open-air swimming pool. It clearly wasn't very popular in the dreary English weather, as it was filled in fairly quickly.
Abutting against the bath complex were multiple public buildings, including a market hall, rooms for officials to meet, and just across a street, the forum. The market hall would have been two stories and seemed to have at least ten rooms on the first floor for stalls to be set up. The forum area has not been excavated and the Roman road running between the two areas has been paved over with a modern road. The forum area is actually underneath a replica of a Roman country house.
The replica home is constructed based off buildings excavated in the Wroxeter area and is meant to represent a Roman home around 320 CE. I wonder at the decision to build the replica house rather than excavate the forum beneath, but it was an interesting experience to walk through a fully constructed Roman home. The house contained exemplary rooms, such as a shop at the front of the house that could have been used as a family store, a triclinium (dining room), cubicula (used for various things, but here shown as a bedroom), and small bath complex in the home. Though the home seems to be set up for teaching children about Roman home life, I still enjoyed wandering through the rooms and getting a fuller sense of what a Roman house was like.
I then scurried off to catch a bus back into Shrewsbury, as they ran every two hours and I had exhausted what I could see at the site. Wroxeter was a lovely and informative site, but sadly so much has been left undiscovered there. Hopefully, there will be more chances to dig there!
Fun Fact #10: There is some evidence that Viroconium Cornoviorum was a center for treating eye ailments. In ancient Roman medicine and religion, it was common to give an offering of the ailed body part to Aesculapius, as an offering to be healed. Usually there was a promise of future sacrifices as well. In Wroxeter many fragments with depictions of eyes have been found, like the ones above. This suggests that there was some specialist or specialists in the town treating (and probably successfully) problems with the eyes!
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